It is in Pot’ma that the convicted are inducted through a transit camp. Their clothes and valuables are taken from them and they are given a suit of dark grey or blue clothes in which to begin their journey into the misery of captivity. After processing they are ready for their trip north on a narrow-gauge railway built in the early years of Stalin’s terror. Thousands of poor wretches who’d been sent to Mordovia had to carve a path through the forest of pine and birch, laying the tracks that would bring successive waves of raw material for the camps that sprang up along the iron way. And in patches marked by simple wooden markers along the route, many of them still lie where overwork, malnutrition, and the harsh prison regime brought them to an early end.
This corridor runs fifty kilometres to the other side of the green desert to Barashevo, where there’s another mainline railway station. Along its length are more than a dozen camps that form a penal colony for more than ten thousand inmates known as the Dubrovlag. There were decades when the number of camps swelled to dozens, others when it shrank back to just a few. For the Dubrovlag and the communities it supported the 1940s were a boom time, the 1970s also, with its combination of dissidents and ‘Refusenik’ Jews who’d applied for visas to go to Israel. Then things got a little leaner, the Jews were sent to Perm instead by the Gulag management in Moscow, and then in the mid-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev arrived. He had actually pledged to get rid of political prisoners, long an important part of the Dubrovlag’s trade, and for a few years he achieved his ambition.
Each penal colony or Izpravitelno Kolony has its number and its purpose. In the 1970s, the dissidents were sent to IK 1, IK 3, or IK 19. In IK 14 they put the female ‘politicals’. There is one for foreigners, and a couple for known sex offenders. The people who run the Dubrovlag have learnt to keep certain types separate, in the interests of good order. Everybody heading into the Mordovian forest knows about convict law, with its hierarchies and vicious enforcement of cell-block discipline.
Skripal was sent to Izpravitelno Kolony 5, IK 5, where like so many before he endured the customary period of hospital ‘quarantine’ before being assigned to a block. The concept is a medical one, naturally, in which any infectious diseases will show themselves before the convict or zek mixes freely among the wider jail population. But it also serves a psychological purpose, as a time for adjustment, an airlock, between the outside world and the closed reality of the Dubrovlag. Even in quarantine the new man can learn what awaits from other zeks and guards. Skripal soon discovered that IK 5 ‘was a camp for people with epaulettes’, as he put it wryly. Many of the convicts there were policemen, army officers, even the odd disgraced FSB type. Such prisoners had to be kept apart from gangsters, murderers, and politicals who might have a score to settle.
In time, as the new zek was assigned a block and detachment, he was able to get the lie of the land and reassure himself about his own physical safety. For Skripal soon gravitated towards a group of convicts who’d served in the VDV or airborne forces. His time in elite groups such as reconnaissance companies, his age, physical presence, and rank of colonel gave him a natural authority among them. VDV veterans ‘formed my first circle of protection in the camp’. In every walk of life, Russians seek a ‘roof’ or ‘circle’ to guard against the vicissitudes of fate, and Skripal well understood that in IK 5 that would be more important than almost anywhere else. If some bully was looking for a prisoner to put the squeeze on, the arguments against picking on a guy within a gang of paratroopers were self-evident.
He got to know the warders, little by little, too. And they told him tales about how their fathers and grandfathers had come there decades before. This had a sobering effect on Skripal, Lord knows nobody could doubt his patriotism, but this was a sick place, somewhere being a camp guard had become a hereditary family occupation – like fishing or farming in the world beyond the watchtowers. There had been nothing there before the Dubrovlag. But with its founding, little townships had sprung up along the narrow-gauge line for those who ran and serviced the penal colony. And their sons or daughters had followed them into the trade of managing human misery. There was simply nothing else to do around there. In IK 5 there were some third-generation warders. Most pathetic of all were the ex-prisoners who had joined their one-time overlords in these little communities once their sentences were over. These broken spirits found they lacked the money and motivation to leave – family having died or deserted them during their years of penal servitude – and simply stayed in Mordovia, making a living doing menial jobs during their twilight years. Nobody who understood Sergei would imagine that would happen to him: he was a fighter of course and he knew from his time in Lefortovo that he could depend on the constancy, love, and devotion of Liudmila, Sasha, and Yulia.
Mordovia’s brief summer gives way suddenly to autumn, and that season is also all too short-lived. Winter is king in those miserable forests. There is snow on the ground for four to five months and temperatures below –30C can be recorded. In the gloom of those short days, many succumb to despair. ‘Grey faces, grey or blue jackets, grey barracks, and grey fences’, wrote another Dubrovlag inmate, ‘even the snow, powdered over with coal dust, had lost its whiteness.’
The layout of IK 5 divided its workshops from the accommodation blocks. It was part of the communist penal philosophy that people transported to these colonies should redeem themselves through labour. In Skripal’s camp there was a shop for woodworking and one for making metal pylons, and a place where army and prison uniforms were sewn. It was in the last that the former colonel was employed. The dormitory blocks in IK 5 held something like twelve hundred zeks, making it one of the bigger places in the Mordovian complex.
Skripal would joke to other prisoners that IK 5 was more comfortable than some of the army billets he’d had. He set about boosting his spending power in the camp. There was an official system of pay, given in return for work, and usable in the commissary. But if he was going to make life bearable, he’d need some hard cash. His bank accounts, containing thousands of dollars he’d made in his private business dealings, had been emptied by the FSB. Confiscation came with conviction for espionage as a matter of course. The money MI6 had been paying into his Spanish account was safely secreted abroad, but of course he could not draw on it, for there could be no clearer confession of guilt. What to do?
The Skripals sold some family possessions, Liudmila scrimped and saved, and a couple of Sergei’s old friends came through. One was an old pal from the VDV, another who ran a Russian car dealership in Spain was a much more recent acquaintance. His brother Valery’s family helped also. They gave Skripal more spending power in the camp and that could be used to bribe people; ‘for me life there was no problem because I paid money to the administration’.
Things started to happen in the dormitory block where he and around a hundred fellow prisoners lived. New showers and toilets were installed. And if he wanted to absent himself from the IK 5 workshop where inmates made prison and army uniforms, nobody seemed to mind. Instead he tried to keep his edge – physically and mentally. He would push weights for hours, proud he could still bench-press 120kg, he would skip, shadow-box, working frustrations out and appetite up. There were TV and books too.
As for food the camp stuff was rubbish, and many inmates of the Dubrovlag soon became skeletal. He couldn’t have that – not least if he wanted to maintain his fitness regimen. So Liudmila made sure the 20kg parcel he was allowed monthly was usually full of ingredients, there being a cooking area in Sergei’s hut. He meanwhile realized that there were many less fortunate prisoners who had nobody to send them parcels, so offering them a cut, he used their monthly allowance to get more and more food sent in.